Technology and Methodology

Fizziology uses best-in-breed technology to collect, measure and score social media buzz. We've built a database that accurately tracks thousands of search queries around entertainment and brands and serves them up for our team of social media analysts to read, score and report on.

We pull directly from APIs

We pull feeds directly from the APIs of the big 3 of social media - Twitter, Facebook and blog search engines. Doing so allows us access to a higher volume of feeds on a more regular basis. There are free public search tools many of our competitors use, but they are quirky and not as accurate.

We search for all relevant feeds – and only relevant feeds.

To create search terms for each property, we triangulate keywords - finding nicknames, contextual cues, abbreviations and common misspellings. For example, the movie "Shrek Forever After" chatter was searched for by also monitoring "Shrek 4," "Shrek 3D" and "new Shrek." There are nuances between each search source and we have to develop the terms accordingly. When adding a new movie title, talent, brand or product to our database, we triangulate search terms to ensure we’re pulling all relevant chatter. We start with broad terms, then narrow down with additional terms to be sure we’re capturing everything- sometimes ending up with dozens of terms per title, per source. Using humans to research, create and evolve these terms has allowed us to accurately search for feeds for movies like Brothers and Bridesmaids and brands like Dove.

Just using the search term "Rio" returns a high percentage of irrelevant results and would artificially inflate volume:

On the other hand, the search term Rio Movie means we're missing a lot of conversation.

We may be capturing this:

But we're missing this:

We read, score and analyze posts.

Our database pulls in total volume and feeds from the APIs of Twitter, Ice Rocket and Facebook. Our social media analysts then read a statistically significant random sampling of feeds to a 95% Confidence Level. They score for sentiment (positive, negative, neutral or mixed) and can score for a relevant set of attributes- like "intent to see" for movies, "sexy" or "smart" for actors or "sporty" or "practical" for a car brand.

Real people read each feed so we can interpret misspellings and references, but also accurately score sentiment even with snark, sarcasm and slang.

We flag trends and provide actionable insights.

As analysts are scoring, they are also looking for trends in the conversation to report- what's driving positives? What's driving negatives? Is there a key line being repeated from a movie trailer? Or a marketing element being discussed for a brand? What does the audience look like (older, younger, fans of the book, what brands do they associate with)? We use this information, along with volume and sentiment of comparable movies and brands to provide an analysis for each property.

We map social media conversation to other marketing activity.

We can map spikes and falls in volume and sentiment of social media buzz to a property or brand's marketing and PR calendar to attribute what's driving positive and negative conversation, and what's not driving enough conversation. This allows marketers to make smarter decisions and better investments.